Hello. C J here. It’s an uncommon thing these days for video games to have a script, especially a large one. Those days of having dozens of voice actors and several writing teams for a game are gone. Games these days are often good but don’t have the massive narrative element that was common in the industry a while ago. To be frank there aren’t really that many stand out fantasy novels either.
The publishing industry took a nose dive when the Kindle was invented. It then hit rock bottom, floundered and screamed violently for a while and then quietly dissolved into goo. Let’s be real, they never paid authors like me peanuts. You had to do your own marketing on your own dollar. And if you didn’t follow all of their archaic rules they’d disown you. A book a year and the main character’s age and gender had to match the target audience by year.
My point is we really don’t have stories anymore. We ran out of them in the fantasy genre. Dragon Engine is a multi-pronged system designed to change things. First, the Journal system. The game logs everything you do or interact with in the player’s Journal. This is saved to a .txt file every time you end the day and save at a campfire. Crafting, walking, the weather, greeting a shop keeper, swinging a sword, all of it’s in there in the code I’m writing. The game self-generates video game themed novels by existing.
Second, the game will have a dedicated crafting location called the study desk. This will allow the player to rig up the Journal system to write something unique. This can rely on the entire script including all the script elements from DLC they’ve bought off me. The DLC price comes with the license to sell anything made in it. The player selects script options for characters and their skills then pair them with locations that include side characters and story goals. The Journal system runs and produces a .txt file composed of parts of the script in the desired genre and length. This is working or I wouldn’t be talking here about it.
The algorithm that runs this generation is called Runes. Runes is closed source. At no point is anyone but me ever learning how it works. Adding your own sets of script elements is easy and I’m working to make it so you can just store them in a .txt file. Then I can make a simple interface in the story writing menu to write a set of them and add them into a story as though I had added them to the core game script. You need sex pieces of text that are 45-75 words long each. They all need to convey the same point and be interchangeable. The rest is left up to the code to rearrange them into a cohesive narrative.
Third, we need a way of sharing all this. This will be easy. An in-game bookshelf can contain 100 player made books. The multiplayer system allows people to invite friends over to share books and read. I’m adding a download button so you can grab them for your phone. The same goes for art posted on walls or in a flip-book journal item on a lectern. This should solve the ages old problem of how to distribute digital art, especially furry content.
Four, the game is divided evenly into two genres. Fantasy adventure is the first and has a script capable of this level of storytelling. I’m adding to it constantly and these additions will be split between free and bought content. Adult slice of life romance is the other and contains an equally large to the number script. This genre turns the tools and weapons a character has into social or magical skills and allows for the creation and sharing of furry art and story. Books are not rated but a shared world can be age-gated if the owner wants it to be.
My point is that people need stories to be healthy. We need them badly. I have my sources of fiction all over the internet I use to inspire the work I do here. I’m not giving them here. None of them are in the genres I make. Why though are we so lacking in narrative? My guess is that we need a shared setting for fiction. Stories reliably burn out the setting they are in. There’s normally only one or two that work on a fictitious continent or in a fictitious world history, then the author runs out of locations and problems to solve. The Legend Setting is designed to fix that. The stories, characters and locations don’t burn out. They grow larger and more complete the more narratives they are in. That’s the goal. One setting, endless stories.
Oh, and one more point. I can reliably write 3,000 words a day, five days a week. Most people can’t read that fast in a day. My stories are well made. This includes the novels I have as free PDFs and their printed versions I’m selling in person later on. I can write bulk high quality story. Use them up. I’ll write more. Take the novels for granted, burn though them and learn whatever you set out to learn about my writing or the characters. I’ll make more and so will Dragon Engine.
It is the company’s name, after all.
C J Mcpherson
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